If you’ve seen a few more mentions of banned piledrivers, extravagant entrances, and people going through Spanish tables during Spring Break on your social media feeds lately, you might be aware that there was a bit of the graps going on this weekend. You might have even heard that there was a little unprecedented intergender wrestling on a very big show.
Exciting times in the squared circle as Wrestlemania season and all it brings winds on down. It’s our equivalent of a universe reset a la comic books. Wrestling in general has received an uptick in attention that began well before Wrestlemania and will hopefully continue afterwards. It’s probably never going to hit the “your grandmother wearing an Austin 3:16 tee to church” zenith of the ’90s again, but maybe that’s alright. Maybe it’s for the best. In today’s climate of discussing fandom openly and critically, wrestling is no different. One hot topic that’s been cropping up, as reflected on Sunday, has been women in wrestling.
You probably already have a few images of women in wrestling in your head: she might be a sexy/scary/screeching valet urging her chosen champion on. As a combatant, maybe she looks like she dropped down from Mount Olympus to kick some butt. Maybe you’re shuddering from flashbacks of lingerie matches. There’s a variety of women present in wrestling and have been since at least the 1940s… kind of. The dearth of women in wrestling stems from a few contributing factors such as the same societal dissuasion that keeps women from participating in traditional combat sports, lack of places to work, and public image as influenced by media. And wrestling is a property that creates its own media image, so the situation becomes a catch-22 of including women because it’s best for business and excluding them when it’s not.
Of course, these critiques of the lack of women in wrestling have gone on forever but they usually come cloaked in hand wringing about the instability of women in any field for biological reasons (gross), the feasibility of women fighting competitively, and lately even the portrayal of domestic violence on screen in the form of intergender matches. Why does this matter right now, in 2018, when wrestling is struggling to become even a little bit relevant again?
To be blunt, wrestling is fake, folks. It’s choreographed. It’s performance art. It’s a great arena to highlight talent and skill, male and female. But it’s also a business where many workers are independent contractors. It’s a blight that women wrestlers are still scrambling for spots in promotions and still getting underpaid. In essence, your livelihood is being strangled.
So conversations have been going on around women in wrestling and there have been steps to improve it, largely on the indies. But similar to having to go to Sundance or a local film festival to get a little diversity in your movies, not everyone has access to a reputable indie promotion and not all of them are good to say the least. And WWE has a habit of eating smaller fish in the sea so for better or for worse, they are wrestling for a lot of folks world over. And when they to finally make changes and catch up to trends, other promotions follow suit. So for WWE to give top spot to women’s matches, create multi-women matches to showcase their female talent, and intergender match featuring recent MMA crossover star Ronda Rousey and Triple H himself? Pretty big deal. And for a mainstream audience, it means the change hardcore fans have been witnessing has finally arrived. Women wrestlers are finally seeing more attention outside of fictional portrayals (although GLOW was awesome).
And that’s how we change perceptions, that’s how we change the conversation. That’s how people get work and continue to make a living. That’s how you change and stay relevant. It’s not all perfect – even as it appears that women are getting more attention on the indie scene and in bigger promotions, wrestling is still heavily male-dominated and hasn’t quite caught up. Most notably in the writing and characterizations of women. There’s still the image of the screechy secretary even if it’s more of a throwback. There’s still some embarrassingly middle school stories out there that no grown woman should participate in. More attention doesn’t inherently mean that the structural issues still in place have been fixed overnight. But it’s coming and it’s happening surprisingly fast if we can keep up the momentum.
As another generation of nerds and geeks grows up and produces their own media, everything niche is in again and wrestling is finally coming full circle. Of course, my personal connection to all this is that a as a wrestling fan of color, I just want to see a little more diversity in my niche, beefy soap opera. I want it to survive and survive well. As I stress, going forward there’s really no excuse. “Why not?” is the answer to everything. Visibility and representation are everything and everyone deserves to be represented in their passion, even if your passion is something as quaint and wacky as wrestling. After suffering through mud wrestling and bra and panty matches in silence just to get a women’s main event, we deserve it, damnit.